Liberation from a Spirituality of Control

How being in a high control spiritual group revealed all the wrong answers — and the unexpected Grace that granted me an authentic way forward.

When people learn that I’m a professional psychic, one of the most common questions they ask me is, “Oh, so how did you find out you were psychic?”. Sometimes the question translates to,

How did you discover that you had extrasensory abilities?

But sometimes, it means something more like,

How did you have the guts to choose such an unconventional career path?

To both questions — I don’t have a short answer, but rather, meandering story-tapestries.

And yet, if one thread stands out in my answer to the second question, it’s the story I want to share with you today. 

CW: This story features spiritual abuse, specifically about my time in a high control group. I’ve steered clear from graphic depictions of abuse, but as always, please check in with yourself before reading.

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My Time in a High Control Group

I was part of a high control group for roughly ten years. While excruciating, my time there taught me priceless lessons about how I want (and how I absolutely don’t want) to show up for myself and others in service of the soul, the spirit, and the inner world.

If you’ve never heard the term “high control group”, think: cult-like. Some define the two terms, cult and high control group, as equivalent. To me, there are differences. The group I was in made me feel like I had a lot more freedom of ideology than what I imagine a cult fosters. The doors of “my” group were open, and I could leave at any time. Of course, they got under my skin in other ways. 

Experts who study high control groups say that anyone, no matter how intelligent, skeptical or educated, can fall prey to their tactics. But as for me, I can’t say I had much in the way of defenses even at the start.

I became a devoted student at the parent organization — the friendly, community-facing outer circle of this group— at the tender age of 19. I checked probably every box on a checklist for risk factors to falling prey to a cult-like organization. Not least of which were that, together with my family, we’d just moved to another continent from where I grew up, and I was in that limbo space of huge-life-transition: starting my undergrad in another language, navigating culture shock, feeling like my very skin was raw from the exposure to my own Otherness at every turn.

And I was idealistic to a fault. The Pisces is strong with this one. I believe, while other factors set me up to be vulnerable, my true desire to be of service and make a difference kept me hooked.

The organization offered structured, in-depth personal development and spirituality courses. Looking back it smacks of a much, much lighter version of Scientology, though the flair was hippie-ish and exotic. Teachings revolved around the sacredness of all life and the subtle energy coursing through each of us. We learned about auras and chakras, healing with crystals; about personal integrity and about interdependence.

People came and went from the outer circle rather safely. If I’d quit after my first three-four years, there’d be no story here other than: I had an amazing time.

The abuse began when I was ready to figuratively give my life for this community, in return for all that I felt it had given me.

Suddenly, I found myself on a path to what I was told was “the Great Work”: the group’s individual brand of spiritual leadership, a road to become a teacher myself within their system and hierarchy.

The goal: to make a difference, to contribute to a radical transformation for humanity. To eventually find wholeness and transcendent enlightenment, along with some major spiritual superpowers, as the world transitioned to a New Era of harmony and elevated vibration.

Nothing else in life could take precedent over this vision. People who left “the path” were talked about in strange ways. They were sometimes used as cautionary tales, sometimes disparaged. We were told our commitment would be tested, but that we were lost without the path.

With that mission-seed firmly planted and rooted through my heart, body and nervous system, I was in a position where I would be receptive to humiliation, love bombing, constantly shifting goalposts, manipulation — just to name a few of their control strategies — to give in to impossible demands on my time, energy and resources. All in the name of a transcendent Greater Good, always like a mirage shimmering beyond my line of sight.

A Real Breakthrough

In what was perhaps the irony of ironies — or perhaps mercy and protection from Spirit’s side — what helped me break the spell of the high control group was that I had a major spiritually transformative experience.

I wasn’t looking for or expecting a spiritual breakthrough. In the hierarchical system I was embedded in, the kind of shift in consciousness I experienced wasn’t expected until I was perhaps many decades further along in the proverbial path.

In a matter of just a few days, however, my world was turned upside down. My perception shifted irreversibly, showing me the deeper reality of love, compassion and non-striving behind the veil of day-to-day existence. It was a very far cry indeed from all the striving my “path” was demanding from me! Suddenly all of the control and coercion mechanisms became apparent in their gross discrepancy from the luminous, yet fully embodied dimension I found myself now inhabiting.

That magical gateway into a new existence opened for me almost exactly ten years ago, now. In the immediate aftermath, you bet I became a lot more psychically open — although I’d been described as intuitive since early childhood. It was a bewildering time, as most of my beliefs and ways of seeing just fell away, and even a lot of my old personality started to fade. Full integration took years, yet even at the beginning, “downloads” of knowing and connection just seemed to pour through me.

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Integrating the Psychic

This brings me full circle to the question at the start: how did I come to choose “psychic” as my work title?

I’d joined the high control group as a teenager with a burning desire, a hunger both for spiritual wisdom and a longing to heal from the lifelong trauma of being weird, different, and not belonging.

The group implicitly taught me that those things would only become available if and when I were able to “pass through the eye of a needle” — through a neverending gauntlet of challenges, disciplines and tasks designed to sever me from vulnerable, essential parts of myself. To weaponize shame, making me believe that some parts of me were “higher” and “lower”, and the lower all had to go: to put me at war with myself. 

To cut me off, truly, from the very feelings, “resistances” and “stuck places” that, when I later learned their true language and significance, became my most trustworthy guides.

My group wasn’t unique in this, in the slightest. In the process of deconstructing the beliefs it planted in my brain, it became apparent that countless other self-improvement and popular spiritual approaches were built on very similar assumptions.

This widely-used underlying architecture is designed to convince us that the access to healing, transcendence and meaning is only attained through a narrow, difficult, “all-in”, twisted version of the Hero’s Journey. It, in turn, empowers sick gurus, misguided and delusional leaders, and those who feed on power-over to engineer the obstacle course to liberation as they see fit.

While my high control story is in some ways an outlier experience, the basic energies that gave rise to it are prevalent. So much of our world, our culture, and the implicit ways we relate to ourselves and each other, are built on our sense of goodness, connection and lovability being held hostage to our performance: to impossible standards of attainment and perfection. It doesn’t just happen in cults. Cults just amplify the normalized relational alienation that’s our collective inheritance to repair.

In the course of my spiritually transformative experience, I was shown there’s no higher or lower, not in the sense the group believed.

I then knew at a visceral level that there was nothing wrong with me. Nothing that needed purging or perfecting to earn a direct line of connection to All That Is. 

I was shown that what we call our intuition, or our psychic abilities, are nothing more and nothing less than the way we directly access that line of connection to the Greater. These senses are always with us, as our individual navigation instruments in the Ocean of Consciousness.  

I believe now that witnessing with compassion through our psychic senses does more for our growth than whatever disconnected, complicated journey we can concoct from a purely attainment-focused lens.

The connection, the healing, the wisdom, the love of our Source, and of our team in Spirit, has never been subject to gatekeeping. Nor duty-bound to a painful, straight-and-narrow, the-only-reward’s-at-the-very-end, enslaving version of spirituality, no matter how epic the story that makes it seem worthwhile.

So, today, I work as a psychic because inside this mantle, and in that interpersonal space with my clients, I’m an advocate, a representative for this perspective, for this way of living and seeing.

Not through blind belief, but through creating a container where we — my clients and I — are in a space where direct revelation can happen.

A container where we’re working hands-on with “the world behind the world”, knowing that its luminous, healing gifts are ever-available to us — not somewhere at the end of an impossible quest.  

While I believe there is such a thing as self-refinement, it takes place inside of the context of us being, at a Soul level, incontestably good, beautiful, connected, and precious. And magical, playful, creative, non-local, transcendent, free to experience adventure after adventure in the multiverse. 

After all I’ve been through, it’s my biggest joy and honor to help others find that this mystical birthright was also theirs all along.

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I hope this story has added some inspiration to your day, even though the subject is not what we’d call “pleasant”. However harrowing, I ultimately don’t regret this chapter in my life, and I hope what I’m able to harvest from it will help or inspire others.

If you’ve had experiences with control-based spirituality or personal development, and are moved to share, please feel free to do so in the comments! (Or via email if it’s too personal). Or comment with anything else that resonates or sparks in your inner world. I look forward to reading you.